38 | FORBES ASIA NOVEMBER 2016
FORBES ASIA
SEMINOLES
When his phone rings, he ignores it
and says it’s someone calling to ask for
a $30,000 loan. That’s why he no lon-
ger visits people on the Seminoles’ six
Florida reservations. All they want is
money, he says. “Maybe it will be my
political demise, I don’t know,” says Bil-
lie, who, as chief, has had at his dispos-
al discretionary funds estimated to be in
the tens of millions annually. It’s a pre-
scient statement. At the end of Septem-
ber tribal members filed a recall peti-
tion, vaguely citing various issues with
Billie’s policies and procedures. The
four other leaders in the tribal coun-
cil unanimously voted to remove Billie
from oice.
It isn’t the first time Chairman Bil-
lie has been ousted. He led the tribe
from 1979 to 2001 before being voted
out amid sexual harassment allegations (the charges were
later dropped) and charges of financial malfeasance. (Billie
later said his removal was due to bad blood over his increased
scrutiny of council member spending.) Then, after a decade
in exile, he was elected chief again in 2011 and reelected in
- Billie vows to run again, in the next election.
He is, after all, a genuine folk hero. Born a “half-breed” in
1944 on a chimpanzee farm in Dania Beach, Florida, where
tourists would pay to gawk at both the apes and the Indians,
Billie tells of how he was taken from his mother as an infant
to be drowned in the canal, only to be rescued by a tribal ma-
triarch. After his mother died, when he was 9, Billie learned
to wrestle alligators for tourists’ tips. In his early 20s he en-
listed in the U.S. Army and served two combat tours of Viet-
nam. He eventually became a touring country singer with
such hits as “Big Alligator,” which is laced with lyrics in his
native Miccosukee tongue.
Billie’s Rambo-with-a-heart reputation helped him get
elected chief in 1979. On his first day in oice someone hand-
ed him a stack of papers describing something called high-
stakes bingo. It claimed that through gambling the tribe could
make $3 million in six months. “That was a lot of money back
then, so I thought maybe we should try it,” he says. To finance
the venture, he borrowed funds from an associate of the orga-
nized-crime figure Meyer Lansky, according to a Pennsylva-
nia Crime Commission report in 1992.
Soon crowds of locals and snowbirds were flocking to the
Seminole Tribe’s 1,200-seat Hollywood bingo hall. Gambling
was illegal in Florida, and the county sherif promptly threat-
ened to shutter Billie’s budding operation. Instead of back-
ing down, he defiantly led his tribe to court and won a land-
mark case in 1981, asserting the sovereign status of Indian na-
tions in such matters. Congress gave its stamp of approval to
tribal casinos with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.
Today 234 Native American tribes haul in $33 billion a year
from gambling, according to the Indian Gaming Industry Re-
port, and they all have James Billie to thank.
Billie rarely drinks and doesn’t gamble, but he’s passionate
about flying planes and helicopters and has a reputation as a
womanizer. His life philosophy mirrors his approach to busi-
ness: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to beg for permission.
For example, in 1980, a mass Seminole grave was discovered
in Tampa, right where the city had planned to put a parking
lot. Billie worked out a deal to swap his tribe’s sacred buri-
al grounds for an alternative location not far from Interstate
4, where he promised to rebury his ancestors’ remains. Little
did Tampa oicials know that Billie would also turn the site
into another gambling hall. The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel &
Casino Tampa now accounts for 40% of the Seminoles’
$2.2 billion in annual gambling revenues.
During his reign as Seminole chief Billie enjoyed consid-
erable riches, including a 47-foot yacht and the use of a small
fleet of helicopters and planes, one of which was a jet once
owned by Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. As hun-
dreds of millions of dollars flowed through the tribe over the
last four decades, tribe members and their employees have
been accused of everything from tax fraud and money laun-
dering to being connected to organized crime. During one
court proceeding in 2002 a tribal council member admit-
ted that he personally spent $57 million over three and a half
years. “I bought [Lexuses] for everybody,” he said. Billie has
also been a target of law enforcement, but nothing has ever
stuck, and he has never been criminally indicted.
The tribe’s connection to Hard Rock began in 2000 when
a Baltimore real estate developer, the Cordish Cos., present-
ed Billie with several licensing options for the two gargan-TRIBAL TRINKETS
Thanks to Hard Rock, the Seminoles have amassed some 81,000 pieces of pop
music memorabilia worth north of $100 million. Below are some of their standouts.Michael Jackson’s leather
jacket from the “Beat It”
music video.Ringo Starr’s drum kit from the 1960s, now in
NYC’s Hard Rock in Times Square.